Diderich and Arend of the Nijburg

Her name was Geertruid Pieck, from Buren. Nineteen, fair-haired, beautiful in the way the Betuwe finds beautiful — clear, not bland, with a laugh that came once per conversation. Diderich (twenty-four) met her first at a feast in Buren. Arend (twenty-one) met her the next evening at the same feast. Both asked for her hand. Geertruid did not wish to choose.

Diderich and Arend decided to fight on their own castle yard. Not weapons to the death — they loved each other too well — but a real mock-duel where one had to lay down. On the morning of 11 May 1432 they faced each other, with wooden swords, before the whole household. Their mother came out and said: «Do not fight. Ask her yourselves.»

Diderich and Arend rode together to Buren, together to Geertruid, and let her choose. Geertruid looked at the two of them a long time. Then she said: «I choose neither of you. I choose a third, who has shown you what you are. It is your mother.»

Geertruid that year married the eldest son of a neighbour in Tiel, a man she had loved before, who had been no knight. Diderich and Arend both stayed single. Their mother, Belia van Nijburg, kept Geertruid as her daughter: monthly together to market, letters, shared recipes.

When Belia died in 1448, Geertruid came from Tiel with husband and three children. Diderich and Arend received her as kin. In Heteren the story is still told as «how brothers learned not to want to win». On the gate of what was once Nijburg house, since 1873, lies a stone with one line: «Diderich and Arend of Nijburg, who did not fight because their mother said so.»